Charlottesville area officials are studying the option of eliminating fares for the municipal bus system in the hopes of stimulating ridership, according to the Daily Progress. A recent study by the Washington state transportation system said that a free system could increase ridership by 30 percent. On the other hand, Charlottesville and Albemarle County would lose $485,000 in revenue, or 10 percent of the operating budget for the Charlottesville Transit Service.
Said David Slutzky, a member of the Albemarle Board of Supervisors and chairman of the Metropolitan Planning Organization which is considering the idea: “We don’t make people pay to take roads here, so why should they pay to get off the roads?”
My gut reaction to this idea is, are they crazy? According to Bacon’s principles of transportation economics, every mode of transportation should pay its own way. People who drive on roads pay for the vast majority of the cost to build and maintain those roads, mainly through tolls and state and federal gasoline taxes. The object of public policy should be to get them to pay 100 percent of the cost — not as we have done in Virginia this past year to sever the connection between driving and road funding.
Likewise, transit systems should pay their own way as well. If the Charlottesville bus system collects only 10 percent of the revenue it takes to operate, what does that tell us about the bus system? Either that the costs are scandalously high, operations are scandalously inefficient, or demand is scandalously low.
According to the Charlottesville Transit Service website, the system provided a little more than one million passenger trips last year. That translates into about $4.60 per passenger trip. I’m no expert in transit economics, but that doesn’t strike me as excessively high. The unwillingness of the population to pay a nominal fare, I suspect, stems from a lack of demand for the service. The transit service, I would hypothesize, does not provide the flexibility of routes and times, or the reliability, that people require.
Flipping the problem around, though, I can see what Slutzky & Company are driving at. That one million passengers translates into roughly 2,750 passengers per day, which translates into 2,750 car trips eliminated. The bus service does get cars off the road.
Does the elimination of those trips mitigate enough congestion to warrant the expenditure of more than $4 million a year in public dollars? Let’s do some calculations. As of the 2000 Census, there were about 50,000 households in Charlottesville and Albemarle County. The average household generates about 10 trips per day, implying 500,000 trips. Thus, the transit system eliminates one out of roughly 180 trips.
Would the expenditure of nearly $500,000 dollars a year for fare-free bus travel, resulting in the elimination of roughly 800 more car trips per day, be a good investment? I can’t say because I don’t know what the alternative investments are, nor how much congestion they might relieve. But that’s one question the Charlottesville MPO should ask itself rather than studying the free-fare option in isolation.
An even better question the MPO should ask is this: Instead of operating a transit system at a cost to taxpayers of $4 million to $5 million a year, should the region shut down the transit service and allow free market competition for shared ridership services?
